Refresh Your Memory

Remembering things can be very difficult, especially right after acquiring a brain injury. When I was in rehab, people would tell me things and I would agree with them, even set a time to do it. Five seconds later they would bring up that same thing that we had been talking about and I would reply “what?”

I notice something though. I would only forget if I stopped thinking about what we had talked about. I noticed I would remember if I had kept coming back to it or thinking about what ever it was that we were talking about. I still use this technique. Even though I do not need to to remember things. I still use this technique subconsciously.

The technique is to REFRESH YOUR BRAIN. Your brain is like a computer, it needs to be refreshed after time passes. Have you ever been online and the website freezes? You can no longer click on anything/ navigate the page. You must hit the refresh button to refresh the page, that way your computer can remember what it is doing.

The same thing happens with your brain. Your brain tends to forget what you need to do. If someone tells you to be somewhere at a certain time or tells you to get something done later, you may forget. In order to remember these things I keep revisiting when that person told me to do this in my memories.

Every time you revisit your memories, you are refreshing your brain. Think of it like this. You can only remember it for so long, say 15 mins. But if you keep revisiting what you are supposed to do you add on 15 mins to whatever it is you need to remember.

So instead of just getting 15 mins to remember you now have an opportunity to expand that time much, much longer.

A Trick To Trigger Your Memory

I know at times it can be difficult to remember things. I know for the longest time I had difficulty remembering things. But, in time, things do get better and you won’t need things to trigger your memory. This post is going to be about a trick I used to do to help trigger my memory.

I still use this technique, just to make sure that I don’t forget. I have the ability to remember without using this little trick, but why not use it? If it will insure that I will remember to do something then why not do it?

The tricks is:

Now a days everyone has a Cell phone. If you don’t have one and you have a brain injury I suggest that you get one just f0r this sole purpose. Every phone has a banner. Some where, where you can write something about you. For example a lot of people have “I love” and there significant others name.

Instead of writing something about yourself, use the banner to write something that will trigger your memory. I use key words that will trigger my memory. An example of this is when I’ll remember that I need to do something, like call someone but not until later.

I will type their name as my banner, so when I see this as my banner later I will remember to call them. Their name is the keyword that will trigger my memory and then I will remember the task I am supposed to do.

This works for me because I see the name as my background and I wonder why it is there. Now it is automatic I see the name and I know what I am supposed to do. It also helps me work my memory.

It helps me work my memory because I am not just writing the task down, but instead I am writing a word down then I have to remember the significance of this word and the meaning behind it.

Remembering People’s Names

I know how hard it was for me to remember peoples names. Especially, when I first went to school. I was barely recovered, my memory wasn’t up to par. Right when I got to school I was meeting all these new people and it was tough for me to remember their names.

All these people would know who I was and I had know idea who they were. I felt like the biggest jerk because they would say “hi, Zach!” and I would answer back “hey, you…” I felt terrible, because they knew my name and I had no idea who they were.

This wasn’t all due to my memory not being great. A lot of it was, but the main reason was that I would meet someone and I wouldn’t see them again for a couple weeks. With a brain injury I learned the best way to improve your memory is repetition. What I mean by this is that I would remember people’s names if I saw them everyday because I would refresh my memory every day or so.

Then my mother had given me a gift one day. It was this CD, that had tips on ways to increase my memory. I would often listen to this after my workouts my freshman year, when I would walk on the treadmill.  There was a section on how to remember names.

It listed a couple of tips, but the on that resonated with me was one that incorporated repetition. It said that people use other nouns rather than the person’s name when they greet them. For example, if the man’s name is actually Jon, “what up man.” The person is replacing Jon with man. I found this interesting and kept listening.

The CD told me to, every time you greet someone, use their name in the greeting. So now instead of, “what up man” you would say “what up Jon” by doing this you every time you see that person you remember this is Jon. Now, your brain will associate this man’s face with the name Jon.

It works for me, I was even getting brothers names correct and other people who looked similar. This is a great trick and if you have problems remembering someone’s name, try this!